Pupils' Experiences of Selection

We have argued that planned and unplanned changes in the last two decades have produced a situation in which schools themselves have had to adjudicate and reconcile unresolved issues of value, often by using informal methods of selection and differentiation with little external guidance, scrutiny or standardisation. Who should be educated, in what sort of curriculum, by which methods, for how long, and with what promise of success? We return now to an exploration of some of the ways in which the schools have addressed these questions, but we use a rather different method from that adopted in part 2. In this chapter we tell the story mainly using a selection of the accounts written by the leavers themselves about their time at school. ¹ Then, towards the end, we briefly set these against a more systematic and quantified perspective on how schools have differentiated pupils and on how pupils themselves have reacted. Both types of evidence, we argue, must be admitted to any overall judgment of the school system.